As an aussie who lives in the US and UK, I look at fascination with how Australia spins out over 50 odd cases. Obviously the disasters that are The UK and US should not even been considered in this conversation.
But is there a level of daily cases that is acceptable to the Australian Public, media - before the words CRISIS etc are used?
I mean the borders are sealed shut and cases keep popping up. Only 50% of Aussies want to get vaccinated. That won’t be done till late 2021 or even 2022. I feel like it’s inevitable that these 10-20-40 case outbreaks are going to keep occurring. And when winter arrives in OZ in 5 months they will happen even more.
So is this collective freak out over 50 cases going to continue into 2022?
Australia has done an incredible job. However i feel the aussie media has whipped a false hope of ZERO mentalality. That is going to lead to another 12-18 months of disappointment and constant state borders closings.
50 cases seems so low to me. Considering 300,000 Aussies présented to hospital with flu last year and no one said a thing
Per capita case loads - when compared on a global scale - Covid is basically non existent in Australia. To get 5-50 cases a day with 26 million people is incredible!
Adjusted for population, Australia is faring about 200x better than the UK and about 300 x better than the US.
I feel it’s a long bumpy 18 months for Australia as zero is just impossible
I agree and disagree with what you say.
We can achieve zero community transmission as we have states that have achieved that. 90 plus days in Qld for example.
And we had zero community transmission nationwide until this outbreak which came from an error in how international arrivals are handled. Each similar outbreak (bar the second wave in Vic) seems to originate from nsw. So tighten procedures there and we can almost live virus free.
But yes we’ve done well.
Yes there should be an agreed acceptable level.
And yes the media love and fuel the hype.
Yep… and this is why other states are currently pending a decision on closing their borders to NSWs. A short term lockdown for a few days (similar to what Adelaide did) should have been implemented, instead this virus may keep bobbing its ugly head for weeks around the Sydney area.
Incorrect, QLD (and WA for that matter) has been taking overseas travellers arriving into hotel quarantine this whole time.
Considering what has happened in VIC, NSW and SA it’s really down to luck at this stage that QLD and WA hasn’t had a hotel quarantine derived community outbreak.
Come off it, the state is open to all but SA (re-opening approx 25th December if no further community cases) and NSW and it’s likely that most other states will close off to at the very least the Sydney metro area in the next 48 hours. WA’s size and remoteness (and lack of medical facilities outside of Perth) puts it at greater risk. Not to mention WA has a functional app-based permit system that meant all entrants from NSW could be contacted and directed to take COVID tests while VIC and QLD have had to scramble to start paper based travel permits back up again.
Sorry, I guess I meant to say “basically” locked off. I know airports take a handful of flights a day with a fraction of seats filled. I mean it’s like, what, 5% of the normal amount? And QLD was locked off to the rest of Australia
Looking at South Korea and other similar regional success stories - there’s a very very thin line between a slight bubbling of cases and an explosion. So many countries who have thought they could have a strategy of just continually having low numbers are now experiencing their highest peaks - a mixture of Winter and holidays.
This NSW outbreak is bad timing - Christmas is when people are travelling across the country, meeting family from all over - if one state has an uncontained outbreak, then this is the absolute worst time of year for that with the sheer amount of travel.
Before Victoria’s second wave we basically did have the general country going along between 10 and 20 cases a day nationally - but that general level of community transmission hid the initial seeding of the 2nd wave. They didn’t make the connection to the new and dangerous spike until too late, because the first few cases were masked by the general amount of population level infection.
0 as a baseline means you always know that outbreaks are new - and you can hopefully react like NSW have up until this outbreak been able to - contact trace the whole lot quickly and get back to 0.
We’re so close to being able to get to the point where we could hold the line long enough to then vaccinate those frontline health workers, and people in aged care facilities - those sparks that ignited the Victorian wave.
Once we’ve done that, sure you could probably tolerate slightly more community spread - as you have a real firewall there, not just hope procedures go right.
I hope we continue to freak out over any community spread. The world has shown that there is no safe level that can be sustained. And Australia has shown that elimination is possible.
Agreed. I’m quite happy to be vigilant and not live with what overseas countries are, thanks very much. Our lives are pretty normal atm, even with this outbreak, and we continue to have low death numbers.
Given the speed at which it spreads, 50 to 100 cases becomes a really critical point in time - it limits the ability to contact trace at high pace which hinders the ability to get in front of the spread. The greater the case numbers, the greater the risk of needing high dependency hospital beds and ventilation equipment (which are fairly limited at the best of times)
Unlike other countries, our ability to fight the virus is constrained by the small (in comparison) size of our Public Health and Hospital offerings - we also dont have the ability that we’ve seen in places like the UK where they’ve been able to build, equip and staff “Nightingale Hospitals” rapidly. On this we’ve got incredibly lucky that we havent had bigger regional outbreaks (outside Cap Cities and large [>100k] population centres) where our health systems are a lot smaller in size and capacity to treat.
This desire for zero that is being pushed by many people (and some states) is somewhat impractical - its a high risk strategy that is built on luck - hopefully, the vaccine can help limit the spread and remove some of the risk factors. What it does do though is help with is outbreak management as @Moe mentions - we know with a much greater level of certainty that they are new and can identify strains as they appear. I think NSW and Victoria have a better approach - we kind of have to live with the virus - while zero is fantastic, we expect that there may be times when thats not going to happen
This continual comparison against the flu is silly, they are not alike.
That’s exactly it. The only way to stay on top of it and have the relatively normal lives that we all want is to have as close to 0 cases as possible and take these clusters seriously when they do pop up. We’ve learnt from everywhere in the world thats exploded in the last few months that trying to sustain a certain range of cases doesn’t’t work. You just get exponential growth over time.